A quick followup to Kerry's post:
I've been carefully rereading and thinking about Paul
Tillich's classic _The Courage to Be_, a large part of which
deals with the distinction between fear and anxiety and the
two types of courage that go with them. Fear, once
objectified, can be dealt with by heroism of the Marlowe
type. One might say that the hero is built for it. Anxiety,
on the other hand, cannot be really resolved or eliminated by
most people (great meditators dedicated their lives to facing
it, but this is not practical for common folk).
Thus the hero, including the hardboiled hero, is not built
for dealing with anxiety, which is the threat of nonbeing. As
Tillich and others, (notably Sartre and Heidegger) have
pointed out, you cannot talk away anxiety, and attempts at
heroic action under anxiety are likely to produce only more
anxiety -- and, as a consequence, the hero often becomes a
victim or a psychopath, depending on how he acts.
In our age, which is the hangover of the triumphant
Industrial Revolution, it is anxiety that dominates private
and public life. Therefore our time and its literature are
not fertile ground to the hero (though occasions for heroism,
or acting selflessly and fearlessly, do exist,
obviously).
Since Nietszche proclaimed that "God is dead", the
existential void (nonbeing taking central place despite the
trappings of consumption, "progress" and "growth") has only
become more pronounced.
In literature, it can manifest itself both in the stories of
disoriented and disillusioned middle-class losers that are so
common in the New Yorker and in the violent, explosive, often
illogical noir stories that we discuss here.
The pure, "pornographic" violence mentioned by another poster
seems to me actually an attempt to resurrect the hero -- this
time with more sophisticated weapons but still believing that
he can set things right. No such thing is possible in a noir
world, which is the world we live in. A literature of
unpredictable violence, born of failure and emptiness, seems
to me realistic.
In this world, a character like Marlowe is an admirable
anachronism -- as admirable as he is irrelevant.
Best regards,
MrT
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